Die gestundete Zeit

Please chip in for my beautiful friend Fran! Fight Lyme Disease!

My fabulously fantastic friend Fran has been diagnosed with late stage Lyme Disease.
She has no health insurance.
She's been fighting this for years now.
Finding treatment has been a nightmare. She was misdiagnosed. She's gotten much, much worse instead of better.
Millions of people are without health insurance in this country, and they're screwed- not only is it difficult to find any decent health care at all; if and when you do, you're treated abominably.
I lived without health insurance for over ten years of my adult life and was fortunate enough not to suffer worse than some very bad 'flu and strep throat. The Lyon-Martin clinic helped me out. I was lucky my needs weren't more severe.
Not everybody is so lucky.
Fran needs $5000 to get the treatment that will enable her to live. And I mean that literally: her very life is at stake. Loved ones recently busted ass to throw a fantastic benefit for her, and we're still short.
Even a couple dollars will make a difference!
Click here for more information: http://www.helphealfran.org, and click below to donate.



love,
Susan

a concise history of black-white relations in the USA

Maurice Sendak

He is, at heart, a curmudgeon, but a delightful one, with a vast range of knowledge, a wicked sense of humor and a talent for storytelling and mimicry.

Help Heal Fran

Help Heal Fran!

Jay Smooth for VP. Seriously.

Jay Smooth says it beautifully in his response to Palin's speech and her "community organizer" put-down. I watched that speech. I'm not sure how I made it through it, but I did. Without throwing up, even.

The Republican Hater's Ball:


Also, Georgia Republican Lynn Westmoreland calls the Obamas "uppity." (And Josh Marshall at the Talking Points Memo blog says, "That's not racism we can believe in.)

And... apparently, Cindy McCain's outfit for last night... $300,000.
That's not elitist, oh no. It's beyond disgusting.

Tea, Sympathy, Shame, Princess Di

Eleven years ago I played the Deborah Kerr part in a mostly cross-dressed, gender-bending San Francisco community theater production of Tea and Sympathy.* We did a two week run at Luna Sea, and on closing night, someone came backstage at intermission and breathlessly informed us that Princess Di had just been killed in a car accident. The accident happened just after midnight on the 31st in Paris, so we would have been hearing about it around 9 pm on the 30th, a Saturday night.

Was the news a shock? Can I blame the death of Princess Di on the fact that I went back out on stage and promptly forgot a section of my lines in the second half, desperately improvising for a few minutes, and slightly muddling up the blocking? I've had shame about messing up closing night for a long time, and although I haven't watched the film since then, when I saw this morning that today marks the anniversary of Di's crash, I promptly looked up the famous last scene on Youtube. It made me cry.





In the play, she's actually up in his room, sitting on the edge of his bed, and as she utters the famous "Years from now-- when you talk about this--" line, she's unbuttoning her blouse rather scandalously.

* From the original script:
"Tea and Sympathy is the story of a lonely and misunderstood youth who, because he has artistic sensibilities and has played women's parts in amateur theatricals, is wrongly suspected of homosexual tendencies. Although the master in whose house he rooms is one of his chief persecutors, the wife of the teacher is kind and understanding as well as beautiful. The play is pretty specific about the physical aspects of the resulting relationship, but it handles it with taste, delicacy and considerable skill."

Sarah Vowell on Obama, Pell Grants, and education

Sarah Vowell: Bringing Pell Grants to my Eyes.

"But I would like to point out that my perfectly ordinary education, received in public schools and a land grant university, is not merely the foundation on which I make a living. My education made my life. In a sometimes ugly world, my schooling opened a trap door to a bottomless pit of beauty — to Walt Whitman and Louis Armstrong and Frank Lloyd Wright, to the old movies and old masters that have been my constant companions in my unalienable pursuit of happiness."

BBC News: Hurt feelings worse than pain

BBC News: Hurt feelings 'worse than pain'

Fascinating stuff:

Researcher Zhansheng Chen, from Purdue University in Indiana, said that it was much harder to "re-live" physical pain than to recall social pain.

He said the evolution of a part of the brain called the cerebral cortex, which processes complex thinking, perception and language, might be responsible.

He said: "It certainly improved the ability of human beings to create and adapt, to function in and with groups, communities and cultures, and to respond to pain associated with social interactions.

"However, the cerebral cortex may also have had an unintended effect of allowing humans to relive, re-experience and suffer from social pain."

Wenn ich mir was wünschen dürfte

we can dance if we want to

This is the first music video I ever saw on MTV, I think.

David Carr: Me and My Girls

"I always thought that people who spent endless amounts of time drilling into their personal histories are fundamentally unhappy in their lives, and I’m not. I’m ecstatic in my own dark, morbid way and subscribe to a theory of the past that allows the future to unfold: We all did the best we could."

Me and My Girls, David Carr in the New York Times.

Film about Lyme Disease: Under Our Skin

Under Our Skin: an infectious film about microbes, money, and medicine.
Go to the website to donate money for Lyme Disease research or to learn more about the disease.

Here's the preview on Youtube.
And click here for short excerpts from the film.

A sweet friend has recently been diagnosed with Lyme. She has suffered a tremendous amount, and still suffers. It keeps getting worse. The fact that she is uninsured makes her experience even more terrifying.

Alice Walker on supporting Obama

Alice Walker on Obama:

I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see him. Cannot see what he carries in his being. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans –black, white, yellow, red and brown - choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.

On Hillary Clinton: One would think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.

ten OTHER things Martin Luther King said

from illdoctrine.com